Someone once told me that The Arcade is like a cat, it has nine lives.  I'm not sure it has nine lives, yet it keeps on going.  It might have died an economic death in 1984, but it continued in operation....

 

After Bankruptcy

 

 

Leo McGarry had closed his grocery and got a job as a court clerk, but still was a regular at the renovated Arcade shopping center.

 

He comments on events in Micky Davis’ “Morning Line” column:

 

:

 

 

He’s the ‘Dean of the Arcade

”there was a great espirit de corps among customers and the tenants, because the Arcade was basically a food operation.”?  McGarry says..Mrs Disher had her cheese counter, the fish market was always here…there were three meat operations, a couple soft pretzel stands, a hot dog place, Culp’s cafeteria, two bakeries, two produce stands.  And until the 1960s, no security.  There was no need for it

 

“What they’ve done with the Arcade is a nice job of remodeling and cleaning it up, but now there’s a corporate image.  The Arcade was built on the reputation for good food. Food attracted people into this building.  Now what attracted people for so many years to this place will be pushed to the basement…

 

“The new thinking is that the nonfood places will bring people who haven’t been here for years into the Arcade” Mcgarry says “That’s reversing the trend of the history of this place.  And they way I see it it won’t work. The non-food places will never draw people to this Arcade so all your accomplish with this hold is taking away first-floor space and putting it down in the basement…”

 

McGarry doesn’t believe any Arcade downtown will ever make it unless its food-oriented, primarily with operations that have a Dayton orientation. 

 

He mentions food operations such as Sigs Sausage on Valley Street, Charlie’s Import Foods on Troy Street, and Cassanos Pizza that he’d want to occupy spots in a downtown Arcade

 

“They are unique to Dayton.  They are Dayton, and the Arcade is a unique building that was built for food operations…”

 

“The people that come here the people who have always come in here come here mostly for the food-not fancy bath powder….

 

“…You sell people a good sandwich or good fruit and cheese and they’ll be back to see you the next day or in a few days.  That’s the history of this place  The Arcade will never make it by offering things that you can find more conveniently in a department store. It’ll never make it by trying to appeal to suburbia.  You can get those people down here once or twice a year…but that’s about it. “

 

McGarry looks upward  at the rotunda’s glass ceiling. 

 

“This is an inner-city place” he says” and that’s the way it will always be. It’s part of Dayton’s uniqueness”

 

As we have seen, the consortium of institutional investors, lead by Aetna, bought the Arcade, and constituted themselves as a joint stock corporation, lets call it “The Corporation”   (yes I know, one needs an MBA or finance degree to figure this all out).  This was just a holding company, as the Arcade was shortly put up for sale.

 

In 1984 the corporation brought in a management company from Northbrook, Illinois, who had helped Aetna straighten out a similar struggling renovation investment back in Hartford.  This consultant recommended that the center be redesigned to improve customer flow and to put in a food court. 

 

The management also terminated Doud, contracting security to another, cheaper firm, with fewer and less well armed guards.

 

Also, in 1984, the city planners finally came around to realizing that the Arcade had to be addressed in context of its entire block, actually its urban context, as was recommended by RKTL back in the 1960s.

 

As a comparison, the 1960s planning and what had been done by the mid 1980s.  The local planners totally missed the boat when it came to Courthouse Square, treating it in isolation (except for a skywalk to connect to a parking garage next to City Hall)

 

 

…as well as breaking every rule in book on how to work anchor stores into shopping centers.

 

After a 10-15 year hiatus, the planners returned to 3rd *& Main to try to “save the Arcade.”   Internal studies were conducted, and with the end result being the Arcade Square II urban renewal proposal.

 

The plan was to provide lots of office space to generate enough of an office worker customer base to patronize Arcade merchants.  The missing parking garage piece was proposed, and a hotel was also considered.

 

Enter Lexington, KY developer Dudley Webb.   The city partnered with the Webb interests to build the project.  The original Webb/Dayton plan was to build twin towers on Main Street, a second arcade connecting to Main, canopies along Main to shelter walkers and shoppers, and closing Third Street to provide a pedestrian connection between the Arcade and Elder-Beerman and Lazarus across the square.

 

 

 

 

The twin towers concept was similar to a Webb development in Lexington, which also involved a hotel, but also condominiums as well as offices.   

 

 

This plan was severely compromised.  Elder-Beerman management objected to aspects of it, and the plan got bogged down by legal issues. 

 

Eventually the city displaced around 15 street-level businesses on Main, Third, and Ludlow. Streets, hastening the death of downtown retail.  As far as I can tell only one, Lerner, relocated into the Arcade.

 

Only one tower was built, Arcade Centre, and it was mostly vacant, never providing the officer worker customer base for the Arcade.  The parking garage was built, but it never provided parking for the Arcade.  The city ended up owning an older vacant high rise (the old Lindsey building) and the former Gibbons building next to the Arcade, and they sit vacant to this day.

 

McCrorys was to have been part of the project, but they dodged that bullet, only to close in the 1990s.

 

Tenants to closure

 

All through this period tenants came and went, and mostly went.  One consistent tenant was Charlies, which was the first tenant to sign on with Halcyon.  It was originally owned by Detroit interests, but went under local ownership in later 1980s 

 

 

Also during this period the Arcade Corporation implemented the food court concept, cutting a hole in the floor to open up the basement and putting the food vendors (except Charlie’s) in the basement.  This was called “The Menu”, and had this neon chef holding a platter as the logo.   The Menu opened in 1986. 

 

 

 

A lot of locals didn’t like this concept, but it made the rotunda era seem taller, as you sort of entered it at the “second floor”, as the ground floor, were the food vendors were, was now the basement level.

 

 

As part of this the basement ‘Arcade Arcade’ lounge was closed (a cocktail lounge based on a pinball arcade concept, probably the only successful “nightclub” tenant recruitment).  The Dayton papers sure liked these ‘last call’ stories, but then again, their newsroom was right across the street from the place, so the journos might have been patrons themselves.

 

 

Apparently security continued to be an issue as in 1985 the city commission, at the recommendation of the city manager and police chief, privatized the public areas of the Arcade as a way to improve security.   The city would eventually have to reimburse the Feds $91K for this action, as it violated a condition of the 1977 Public Works grant.

 

The Arcade limped along for a few more years, losing money.  Tenants came and went.  A news piece on one of the new tenants during this time probably wins the award for corniest headline pun:

 

“Shop owner Andrea Fitzgerald’s Irish aisles smile upon you”

 

 

The Corporations asking price was $1M.  The Corporation tried to sell it to Webb, but he wasn’t interested.  The Corporation tried to sell it to the Dayton Chamber of Commerce, for $1, for the Aviation Hall of Fame, but that didn’t happen.  The Corporation probably would have finally closed the complex in 1991, as the Federal preservation tax credit would have expired then, based on some reports.  Instead, some interesting things happened in 1990.

 

Aetna was approached by a California developer, who made a $100,000 proposal to buy the property and redevelop it as a mix of hotel and retail.  This developer was validated by Aetna’s broker, Coldwell Baker, who did a background check, so it was a serious offer.  Another similar offer was made by the owner of Charlie’s and a local, Centerville-based developer.   

 

Aetna took the California offer to the local partners, Society Bank and Gem Savings.  The local head of Society, Douglas Hathaway, nixed the deal, saying he wanted a local owner.  Yet the local offer by the restaurateur/developer partnership was apparently not considered.

 

After this, press reports indicate that Society bought out Gem Savings and Aetna’s shares in the corporation, and then sold the corporation to Danis for $100,000, though Danis was reimbursed some funds due to back rents, resulting in a net sales price of $30,000.   An interesting aspect of this is the minority partner, Society, buying out the majority partner, Aetna, prior to the sale.   Apparently Aetna wanted the hell out.  Another interesting aspect is that the sale price, $100,000, matched what the California developer was offering.

 

This action was masked from public record due to the nature of the transaction, as Danis apparently just bought out the shares of the corporation which held the Arcade, not buying the building from the corporation.   The info on the sales price came out in court case a year after the sale.  Thought this sounds like a deal for Danis, there was an expense of $600,000 to relocate the tenants.   Danis did keep the local property tax abatement, though, until around 2000.

 

Danis then announced the Arcade would close.  This happened in April 1991.   Only two tenants remained; a jewelry store on the 3rd Street side and Arcade Seafood, which had a Ludlow Street entrance.

 

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After Closure 

 

The timeline….

 

 

 

Recall from an earlier thread a mention of the contractor for the Arcade, Danis, having involvement with the city in developing the Concourse 70/75 Industrial Park during the 1970s.

 

This project was on top of one of the city’s well field recharge areas.  A chemical fire in the 1980s brought the issue of well field protection to the fore, and the city passed a well field protection ordnance and established a buyout/mitigation fund using water fees, to reduce hazardous uses. 

 

 

This ordnance also reduced the marketability of Concourse 70/75, meaning Danis couldn’t realize full value of the property.

 

After Danis bought and closed the Arcade, it was tied into a package deal with Concourse 70/75, where the Arcade would be given to the city if the city bought the industrial park.   The price was $6M

 

 

 

According to press reports there was some opinion at the time that Danis was using the Arcade as a bargaining chip to get the city to take Concourse 70/75 .   In negotiations the city tried to get Danis to decouple his industrial park/arcade package deal but this was refused.

 

 

After this early flurry of controversy about the city trying to purchase and operate the Arcade the next big plan was for public/nonprofit sector reuse, including a fairly serious one to copy Cincinnati and do a Union Terminal-style museum center.

 

 

This is where the paths of these two structures diverge.  Recall Union Terminal was remodeled into a shopping center around the same time the Arcade was.  As with the Arcade this shopping center was not successful.  However, Cincinnati apparently had enough good local leadership and supportive citizenry, as the structure was saved and remodelled a museum complex while Dayton dithered with the Arcade.

 

In any case there wasn’t enough strong leadership or will as the “Arcade Museum Center” failed in 1995 as it cost too much (too much state capital $$$ and private donations, that is…apparently no one investigated a countywide tax levy or bond issue, which is how Union Terminal was redone).   A key component of this museum, the Aviation Hall of Fame, eventually moved to the Air Force Museum.

 

Danis continued to maintain the Arcade, via Larry Stein Realty, keeping the utilities on maintaining the building., and opening it up for charity events.   Some here might recall the two HollyDays Christmas markets, though it was opened in later years for private charity events.

 

For public uses, after the 1995 museum center failure there was an offer by Danis to sell the building to Preservation Dayton for $1 so the building could be developed into an arts center, incorporating a new home for the Dayton Visual Arts Center (DVAC) as well as studios and artists housing  (this sounds a bit like Westbeth in NYC).  This failed and DVAC opened its gallery on Jefferson Street in the early 2000s.

 

Apparently the last somewhat serious private offer was one by Landmark Development of Cleveland to develop the Arcade as residential.  This deal fell through when the mayor and a city commissioner insisted on retail on the 2nd floor, which the developer thought was not marketable

 

There were other offers and plans but that one seemed to be pretty close to happening.

 

The principle of Danis retired to Florida and divested himself of his Dayton properities and businesses in 2003 and 2004.  He donated the Arcade to Brownfield Charities in March 2004, whch was a charitable deduction for Federal taxes..   Along with the title came a bill for $74K in unpaid property taxes.  This tax bill would continue to grow

 

The utilities were turned off in 2005.  The last tenant, Arcade Seafood, left that year.  Presumably routine maintenance stopped when Danis gave the property away.  The building is no longer climate controlled and protected from the freeze-thaw cycle, and is undergoing water/moisture damage.

 

Brownfield  started to do work in the building to fill in the food court, but got a stop-work order from the city. 

 

You can follow the rest of the chronology here at Urban Ohio, at this thread, which starts in 2004.

 

One of the things that happened after Danis was the Downtown Dayton Partnership study, which looked at partial or total demolition.  This was not the first time the D-word was used, as a city commissioner mentioned that during the Concourse 70/75 package deal controversy of the early 1990s 

So demolition is entering the conciousness of the community as an acceptable solution to the Arcade problem, certainly it is being considered by the downtown buisness community and city political leadership, given the DDP study.

 

Personal speculations on re-use

 

The Commercial Building, probably has too small floorplates for modern office use   A building that had a similar problem was the Reliance Building in Chicago, an early skyscraper.  It was remodeled into a boutique hotel, The Burnham.   This has been suggested for the Arcade, too.  So envision the Commercial Building as a boutique hotel.

 

 

 

 

Then, knowing that Cleveland had some successful re-uses of the arcades, and also has a successful indoor urban market house, I was thinking maybe Cleveland could show the way for Dayton. 

 

 

 

 

Finally, cogitating on the market aspect and thinking back on Leo McGarrys words about the Arcade being “inner city”, made me think of the big market in Detroit, which is also inner-city, unpretentious, and gets a mix of city people and suburbanites for shopping. 

 

 

….as perhaps something for Dayton to emulate, on a smaller scale.  The concept here would be different from 2nd Street Market, as that is more specialty things.  I would envision the Arcade selling the basics, like produce and maybe a butcher operation, but at prices that could beat Meijer and Cub, for the people who live in the city of Dayton and who might be coming downtown on bus or during Saturdays, as well a suburbanites (the nearby example would be Findlay market, with its customer mix of neighborhood types and suburbanites)

 

Having this as a public market would be the public purpose that could justify tax money being used to renovate and subsidize operating costs.   And I’d say it would have to be countywide tax money, funded the way Union Terminal renovation was funded.

 

 

This thinking is totally blue-sky, unrealistic.   Markets like the Detroit one and Findlay Market, have long history & tradition behind them, and systems of farmers and purveyors that provide the food.  The Arcade died as citywide market years and years ago, as did the wholesale system and truck farming to support it.   Besides, there would be opposition as there already is 2nd Street Market.

 

The Future- No Arcade

 

In seems every big planning decision or public amenity investment of the past 10 to 15 years has been to remove more and more options and possibilities, for the Arcade.

 

 

 

 

If I was better at computer graphics I could do some “airbrush” renderings of what the future could hold…instead some quick powerpoint whiteouts & line sketches….No Arcade…..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But is this what we really want?   To let these buildings die so we can tear them down?

...and this on the dirty windows of the Arcade....a faded, anonymous cri-de-coeur….

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting...

A couple of thoughts...

 

When was the 'new' courthouse torn down?

 

Has a new central library ever been considered for the arcade/portion of the arcade. After visiting Columbus' and Fort Wayne's recently, I think Dayton could do better. Can you imagine the rotunda as a reading room?!?!?

I don't know.  I'd assume it went down in the early 1970s, with the rest of the Courthouse Square block.  Unless it was torn down earlier.  I don't know the details of CH Square.

 

There was an article, sort of an op-ed, in the DDN that mentions the library relocation as a discarded alternative for the Arcade, discarded because the floors/structure wouldnt be able to take the weight of the book stacks.

Great Work! My feeling is that until downtown gets 3,000 to 5,000 more workers (yes, i said 3-5 THOUSAND), the Arcade has no future. By getting that many people downtown on a daily basis, you would have enough of a customer base to make it work. But there's another problem - geography. When the "new" Arcade opened in 1980, 3rd & Main was the center of downtown, particularly after work and on the weekends. Now the center of downtown is at Patterson & Monument. In order for the Arcade to work, it needs activity post workday and on the weekends. All those people now gather at Riverscape and 5/3 Field. The Arcade is too far from there to see any spinoff from that.

 

As for the mid-1980s food court - the reason I think it was absurd is this: People will walk through a whole shopping center to get to the food. The food court should have been put on the 2nd floor. Yes, you would have lost the ability to eat under the dome, but all of that traffic would have been brought up the 2nd floor. All of the patrons would have had to walk past the merchants on the 1st floor, generating constant foot traffic to both floors. Here in Philly we have Liberty Place, which has two tall office towers and an Arcade like shopping center between them (it even has a dome). The food court is on the 2nd floor. Guess why?

 

As for the "new" courthouse, it was torn down around 1974 to make way for the open plaza on Courthouse Square. As the originator of this thread so ably pointed out, CHS's design is faulty, never taking into account the Arcade, but that's the history of Dayton. They do things piecemeal - something here, something there - never looking at the bigger picture. By the way - the original plan for Courthouse Square was to tear down everything in the block and just have a big open plaza with a fountain in the middle. At least they stopped that.

"They" always say that the last courthouse to be torn down in Ohio was torn down in 1974, but that was Franklin County. Montgomery must have preceeded 1974, unless "they" actually have it down to the month of demolition.

Well, the original courthouse is still standing.  Which is kind of a point to be made, as it is the outstanding example from its period for Dayton...every so often a building rises above the mediocrity to a certain level of excellence.  The courthouse would that building for antebellum Dayton.

 

The Arcade would be that building for era of industrial expansion, a commercial building that rose to a level of excellence that elicited national recognition, and as well as becoming a local landmark.

 

I can't accept that this building has no future.  If anything, saving this building will be the "Penn Station" preservationist fight for Dayton for this century.  Can anyone here really envision this building gone? Demolished?  And what that would say about Dayton: that this community, collectivitly, could care less if this architectural gem, this rare example of a fine public space, is torn down?

 

It would be damning. 

 

 

 

 

An important Thank You to Jeffrey for his chronicling this phase of the Arcade.

 

Some randowm thoughts and observations:

 

1. Leo McGarry's insights - Food - at the street level, food was always the driver here. Providing food & beverage options/opportunities for those who live, work and regularly visit and populate the downtown has always part of the key to the street-level vibe of this special center of Dayton.  The second key was/is the multiple street-level access point into and out of the Arcade - that is critical to creating the robust vibe that complements the food/beverage and the daily inspiration/respite that elevates the experience because of the stunning, beautiful architecture.  It was designed and stood/stands as a cathedral to the spirit of the everyday Daytonian!

2. Interestingly enough.............. While generating enough revenue to keep the Arcade afloat and operating in the time period between 1980 - 1991 was needed, the retail never paid its way. That was not a surprise, the ebbing of the postwar downtown retail/shopping experience started in the late 1950's when the early shopping centers (Northtown, Eastown, Westown, Town and Country) followed by the first phase malls (Dayton and Salem Malls) followed by the second phase malls (Fairfield Commons followed by The Greene - facilitated by the construction of I-675) and Austin Landing (facilitated by the construction of Austin Boulevard interchange). Footnote - most of this retail expansion was not necessarily fueled by real market demand (the Dayton region has not netted additional population since the 1970's) but was fueled by real estate development occurring with easy access to capital - all but blew up in the Great Recession bubble of 2008/2009.

3. Meanwhile back downtown ..................... the City of Dayton made a political decision to construct a new office tower in 1994. This came about as Webb-Henne came into town and wanted to build a new office tower at the southeast corner of Third and Main Streets (to redevelop the old Elder-Beerman property that surrounded the historic American Building). That interest was channeled to the southwest corner of Third and Main. The in-house development team (at the time) imagined that a new major office tower filled with hundreds of employees would sustain traffic needed to keep the street-level of the Arcade sustainable (what in fact happened was, with the completion of 675, the reverse occurred - I was downtown planner at the time and tracked close to a 1/4 to 1/3 of the downtown job base out to the new 675 corridor).  I did want to add here that, while bankruptcy and a business decision to close the Arcade for some future redevelopment team, up until the very last day, it was the food/beverage vendors that paid their rent (they kept the ship afloat for the rest of the passengers until the last day).

             The planners (Jack Becher mentored John Gower in this second phase) were given the assignment to craft a second phase urban renewal plan/project to make this happen (setting the record straight here - the planners did not think that this would work given the ebbing of the\ office market due to 657 sprawl - and - removing the remaining successful retail (the remaining retail in the block continue to succeed - partly because of very low rents or ownership of buildings - and a thriving part of the remaining ecosystem of retail whose demise was accelerated with the completion of 675 and the shifting of retail supply chasing rooftops to southeast Dayton).  The fundamental of the plan requirements were that the street-level of the new tower would be filled with market-driven lifestyle amenities that would complement the street-level of the Arcade. Critical to the reshaping of the function of the block would be a Main Street front door' to the Arcade that would occur as part of the tower concourse (if you walk into the concourse of the tower today, you will see a pair of doors on the west wall - this would have created a direct connection with the street-level of the Arcade). Unfortunately that Arcade transferred ownership to Danis and was closed prior to the opening of the new office tower.

            Linked to both the first and second Arcade urban renewal plans was the linkage to Courthouse Square. The Courthouse Square Urban Renewal Plan/Project occurred prior to the Arcade. Critical to functional layout of the new Courthouse Square was the strengthening of a mid-block, north/south spine that would functionally link/tie the street-level of both blocks to fuel robust/vibrant foot traffic that would support urban lifestyle uses that, in turn, would strengthen the value proposition for the 2 new towers of Courthouse Square and the future redeveloped Arcade block. The good news for the 1974 to 1976 CHS redevelopment was that the street-level layout for the Square would support that vision. The bad news for the CHS redevelopment is that the new corporate tenants  of the 2 new towers did not want to 'clutter' the new image of their towers with traditional active urban uses. They had the architects design the 2 new towers with protective landscaped moats around their bases (to keep whomever away from their buildings. The ground floors of the 2 new towers had bank lobbies and airline ticket offices as the new image for the downtown street-level.  The good news about this bad news is that there is great opportunity to reimage/redesign/remake the street level of the towers and the square into a 21st century vibrant lifestyle campus.

4. Back to the Arcade - Danis did an exceptional job of stewardship and care for the Arcade. Mr. Tom Danis had said that he did not know (as a developer) how to make that work. However, as a lifelong Daytonian (and former Chaminade graduate) he knw the importance of this landmark and that its next redevelopment would be critical to the overall success/value proposition to the core of the downtown. Had this not happened, the Arcade would have (absolutely) succumbed to demolition and not allowed for it to be reimagined as a learn/live/work/play/create 'city-within-a-city' that is occurring before our eyes.

5. Referencing the earlier comments made the integrated functional linkage between Courthouse Square, that mid-block street-level pedestrian flow, observed by William Hollie Whyte (cam to Dayton 3 times on the late 1980's) was equal to any New York vibrant sidewalk - he took his count during lunchtimes mid-block in that north/south Arcade footpath.

         Jim Nichols (lifetime downtown enthusiast, optimist, evangelizer, journalist, resident), just before he retired and the Dayton Daily News brought the weekly publication 'The Downtowner' to a close, opined (to my recollection) that while there was always new progress, sustained investment, enthusiasm and hope for downtown Dayton, it could never be fully realized while the Arcade remained dark. I have never forgotten his comments. To be a urban design/placemaking clinician here, it was his basic understanding of the experience and vibe of that flow of dense flow of vibrant Dayton humanity of this magical path would mean to a new vibrant downtown core.

 

humanity

 

of how important and vibrant the expewrince of the robust activity 

 

 

 

Thank you for this.  I'm sure Jeffrey would appreciate this.